Employees aren't being properly supported, and employers are leaving valuable dollars on the table.
America's population in 1900 was 76 million. A century later, it had
risen to 281 million. It's safe to say that 19 years later, the number
has definitely risen even more.

Besides the population growing and evolving, there's another area of
society rapidly growing and evolving and that's the workplace. The
popularity of remote work, along with various other trends, has been
discussed and brought to the forefront.

However, despite all of the discussions about improving the workplace,
there's a crisis that is going unnoticed. That crisis is employee
caregivers.

In a recent study titled "The Caring Company," two Harvard Business
School researchers, Joseph B. Fuller and Manjari Raman, discovered that
employers underestimate the struggle (and burden) that employees face in
balancing their professional and caregiving roles.

The informal care economy is massive. A 2015 AARP report estimated that
over the previous 12 months, more than 43 million adult Americans had
administered unpaid care to an adult who needed support or to a child
with special needs. To further expound on this, it was also discovered
that six out of 10 family caregivers held a job while providing unpaid
caregiving support.
Why Caregiving Must Be Addressed in the Workplace

The Census Bureau projects that for every 100 working-age Americans,
aged 18 to 64, there will be 72 people outside that range in 2030, up
from 59 in 2010. People may be living longer, but that doesn't
guarantee a high quality of life to coincide with it. As these
individuals get older, the burden falls on the employees who are going
to work each and every day.

If companies want to retain top-end talent and high performance, then dedicating more attention to this issue is a must.

Also discovered in the study was that 73 percent of U.S. workers
possessed some sort of caregiving role. Further exploration of these
workers found that 32 percent left a job due to the difficulty of
juggling their professional life with their caregiving life.

Eighty percent stated that caregiving duties prevented them from optimal
performance at the workplace and 28 percent said that caregiving had
hurt their careers.

To start generating some positive momentum toward this issue, here are three steps to begin with:
1. Assess your current workplace.

It's hard to alleviate an issue if you don't fully understand it. Yet
many companies are attempting to do this. Some 52 percent of employers
surveyed in this study don't track data on their employees' caregiving
responsibilities.

If you don't track and collect data, you won't be able to get an
accurate pulse of your workplace. Therefore, the first step in this
process is to simply start gathering data and feedback from your
employees. Sending online questions (that can be anonymous) is a simple
and cost-effective way to get the ball rolling in the right direction.
2. Offer subsidies and more paid time off.

Besides underestimating the severity of the situation, employers are
also not providing the key benefits that employees are looking for. In
the study, employers discovered that paid time off was the most
important. However, only 55 percent of eligible employees utilized the
benefit, and only 59 percent of the employers surveyed offered this
benefit.

To help this situation, offer more paid time off and also communicate this more clearly through various company channels.
3. Offer targeted education and training.

As someone who has personally dealt with caregiving over an extended
period of time, it can be stressful, conjure up many difficult emotions
to process, and lead to unintentionally neglecting personal well-being.

Simply put, caregiving can lead to you also becoming sick. And it's with
that notion in mind that educating individuals in this arena is
pivotal. Being a caregiver is a unique and discomforting situation to be
in.

Providing access to stress experts and other individuals targeted
specifically to help employees navigate the difficult terrains of
caregiving is a high-yielding action that will provide immediate
dividends to everyone involved.

Going above and beyond by taking care of employees who are caregivers
will be one of the key ways to stand out from other businesses in the
imminent future.https://www.geezgo.com/sps/52985